Negative Geez by CH3SH1R3 M4TT	Last Updated: 04 July, 2010
Modern Philosophy

Nothing is Real 07/01/10 Nothing is real. Of course it is, all of it, you'd say. I can touch things and feel them, that makes them real. I can see things and watch them, that makes them real as well. But really, in a world where even the one doing the feeling and the watching isn't real, wouldn't the experiences of the unreal be just as not real? Well that's the universe we live in, plain and simple. When you view something you are not viewing the object at all, you are simply interpreting signals given to your brain along your optic nerve. The signal itself is sent by cells in your retina that react chemically with photons to produce electricity which ends up being the signal. The photons get to your retina in an orderly way by passing through the lens of your cornea and being focussed sharply to produce clear images. The photons themselves are our only link to the objects that we "see". They have come from whatever source they were emitted from, usually the sun, bounced off an object and reflected into our eyes to produce our perception of the outside world. In fact it's interesting to note that when you view the moon your eyes are processing photons that hit it about one and a quarter seconds ago, and when you bask in the sun's glow, you are being hit by photons that left the surface of the sun over eight minutes before. My point is that we are basically just interpreting a soup of photons when we do what we call "seeing". And the sense of touch is just as mysteriously linked to quantum particles in an interesting way. When you touch something your nerves basically just inform you that your skin has been depressed in a particular manner that translates into a texture that your brain recognizes as soft, hard, rough or smooth. But when you touch something you never really come into contact with it, in fact no two solid objects can ever touch. This is a product of electromagnetism on an atomic level. Every atom has a magnetic field that on tiny distances is extremely repulsive to the fields around other atoms. So when two atoms come together most often they push against one another, hard, so much so that the objects those atoms are part of will experience what we normally describe as contact or a collision. How does all of this mean that nothing is real? Well as you can see the majority of our daily lives and our perceptions about the world around us is based on senses that rely very intimately on the laws of quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics is a tricky science, if it can even be called a science. It is the study of how our universe works at a very miniscule yet fundamental level, and it is fraught with counter-intuitive predictions about how our world behaves on scales smaller than an atom. While the suggestions of quantum mechanics often make even the brightest scientists and philosophers stop, scratch their heads, and say "well that just can't be right." it has time and time again been proven to be extremely accurate in it's prediction of the way that our real world behaves all around us, all the time. Quantum mechanical weirdness knows almost no bounds, I wont go into any kind of encyclopaedic rant about all of it, that would take forever, but I will give you a few important examples: 1. Matter and energy can exist as either particles or waves, or both. 2. It is impossible to measure all the information about a quantum system, one can only know where a particle is or how fast it moves, not both. 3. It is possible for a quantum system to exist simultaneously in more than one state, in fact it is often necessary for quantum processes. All of these examples should begin to give you a sense that the smaller things are, the weirder it gets, and you'd be right to feel that way. If you want to you can even mathematically describe all the objects in the universe and their constituent parts as tiny twists and curls in the very fabric of space and time. Not even real objects separate from the space they occupy, just a different configuration of the same stuff. That's not to say that's an accurate representation of reality, it's just an example of the way that everything on a very tiny scale is so odd and behaves so strangely that the concept of what is real and what can be taken for granted gets turned on end.  Even chemical reactions are purely quantum interactions. Then when you take into consideration some of the more ghost-like qualities behind the most cutting edge theories on our universe and how it works you begin to question what you know about the most fundamental aspects of your own existence. Aspects like quantum holography, wave function collapse, particle-duality and non-locality and even the notion that we exist in space with ten or eleven dimensions rather than the simple three we are used to. Basically all you can say is that what you perceive is real to you, so you have to trust your mind to interpret the mindboggling soup of waves and particles that dance in and out of our realm of reason and give you an accurate representation, at least one accurate enough to survive in ancient times and open enough to incorporate the concepts our modern world has nourished our minds with. -CH3SH1R3 M4TT Share

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